Having made arrangements with the ostlers in the university’s stables to take care of his horse over Yuletide, Ambrose passed his portmanteau up to the driver and climbed into Giles’ shiny black, covered berlin. “Traveling in style,” he quipped as the driver coaxed the horse to a slow trot.
Giles chuckled. “I’m too old to traipse about Scotland on a horse. You’ll feel cramped with those long legs of yours but, for a skinny fellow like me, a two-seater is ideal.”
The narrow, pot-holed streets of Edinburgh made for a slow and bumpy ride. Ambrose gripped the edge of his seat as he and Giles were jostled against each other. But the carriage had its compensations. “At least we’re out of the cold wind,” he allowed.
Giles nodded. “And the ride will be smoother when I replace the leather suspension straps with the newly-invented steel springs.”
A few miles outside Edinburgh, the driver climbed down from his perch and coaxed the horse aboard the galley that plied the Queen’s ferry route across the Forth.
Giles suggested they remain inside the berlin. “Too windy out,” he observed, spreading a woollen rug over their legs. “I plan to nap for an hour.”
“What about the driver?” Ambrose asked.
“Rob will be fine. He doesn’t feel the cold, and he’ll tuck himself into the suspension at the back.”
Glad he wasn’t out in the wind with the hardy Rob, Ambrose blew on his fingers and folded his arms across his chest in an effort to keep warm. Listening to Giles’ snoring, he began to question why he was heading off to Perth. It would likely be even colder there, whereas Christmas in the comfortable and admittedly opulent Pendray manor house consisted of joyful gatherings around a hearty fire. They’d catch up on each other’s lives, play parlor games, drink copious amounts of mulled wine and stuff themselves with rich food until they couldn’t move a muscle. He hadn’t reunited with his brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles since Easter, and he’d missed them. If he went to Perth, he might not even make it home in time for Hogmanay, an even bigger celebration than Christmas.
The idea of assisting with the care of men wounded in battle bordered on the foolhardy. He’d worked with patients in Edinburgh hospitals when practicums were assigned, but the worst problem he’d dealt with unsupervised was a septic carbuncle on an unmentionable part of a portly gentleman’s anatomy. He’d taken a goodly amount of ribbing from fellow students over that episode.
As the icy gusts buffeted the berlin, the leather suspension straps creaked and whined. “The wind’s filling the sails,” he muttered. “Should make for a shorter crossing.”
Giles slept on.
* * *
Teeth chattering so much it made her jaw ache, Eala made a futile effort to keep her skirts out of the mud as she tramped back across the moor to the wee croft where Evan lay in a delirium of pain. The cantankerous farmwife had done little to help since Dr. Raincourt’s departure for Edinburgh two days before. After dressing Evan’s wound, the kindly doctor had promised to return with another physician, but she doubted he would.
However, Dallis Molloy harped on constantly about the danger to which her husband had exposed his family by sheltering a wounded Jacobite. She made the sign of the Savior across her body at least a hundred times a day.
The woman’s palpable fear and the apparent hopelessness of the situation had driven Eala to Scone’s chapel—not to mention the dozen undernourished Molloy bairns clad in smelly rags.
Evan occupied the only space used as a bed in the dismal hovel. Eala thanked God she’d been raised in a comfortable house on Perth’s High Street. The sooner she could retreat there…
Although, then she’d be badgered for news and kept abreast of the latest dire predictions by her opinionated father.
“I hope no one saw ye,” Dallis hissed when Eala entered the croft.
She shook her head. After the sneezing fit, her throat was still too raw to speak and Dallis likely wouldn’t hear her over the racket of squabbling bairns.
The rope bed sagged when she perched on the edge and looked at Evan. The stone knight had spoken true; she didn’t love him, but he deserved a better fate than to die an agonizing death in a noisy, filthy hovel.
“I’m getting better,” he rasped, startling her. She’d thought he was asleep.
His condition had clearly worsened. The heavy bandages swathing his wounded forearm still oozed blood. At least, she hoped the dark stain was blood. However, there was no point contradicting him. She forced a weak smile, wringing cloudy water out of a pitiful rag sitting in a cracked enamel basin beside the bed. “I prayed for you in the chapel.”
It wasn’t an outright lie.
He grasped her hand with surprising strength. “Did ye petition Our Lady, and the Holy Ghost?”
Alarmed by the burning heat of his skin, she resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Her own family had remained nominal Catholics, whereas the Bruces were staunchly Protestant, a conversion that hadn’t hindered Walter Bruce’s rise to the post of Lord Provost of Perth. Evan seemed determined to cling to theAuldreligion, though it angered his parents. She had to admire his steadfast faith, but where had it got him? Nigh on two weeks of agony.
“I did,” she lied as she carefully replaced the almost dry rag on his sweat-beaded forehead with the one she’d prepared.
“Water?” she asked when he licked chapped lips.
The croft’s only saving grace was a deep well that provided plentiful potable water. She went to the blackened hearth and filled the wooden dipper from the half-barrel. The Molloy household possessed no tumblers, so she helped Evan lift his head. He sipped, but the strain of the meager effort was evident on his once-handsome face.
I should have prayed for Dr. Raincourt’s quick return,she thought.